http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=12624

dated 4 August 2007 | issue 2062

Posted: 6.49pm Tuesday 31 July 2007

Debate and Comment

Dan Hind on Kant, the "war on terror" and Enlightenment values

Enlightenment values of truth and rationality 
have been hijacked and wrongly used to justify 
the "war on terror", argues Dan Hind

In 1784 a German magazine asked its readers to 
answer the question, "What is Enlightenment?" 
Among those who replied was the philosopher 
Immanuel Kant.

He wrote, "Have the courage to use your own 
reason! That is the motto of Enlightenment."

Generations of columnists have reduced Kant's 
remarks to a series of clichés and impressive 
sounding phrases that do little more than 
corroborate liberal conventional wisdom.

This use of the Enlightenment crops up in a very 
particular context - when commentators decide 
that it is time to defend "rational" (usually 
Western) modernity from its "irrational" enemies.

Thinkers associated with the 18th century 
Enlightenment movement such as Voltaire, Thomas 
Jefferson and David Hume are enlisted to give a 
kind of grandeur to this theme.

It is in the politics of Western military 
aggression that this model of Enlightenment has 
had the most pernicious influence.

The idea that the values of the Enlightenment 
such as secularism and modernity were under 
attack gained ground in the years after the 9/11 
terrorist attacks.

By October 2001 conservative commentators in the 
US were calling for "enlightened" intervention in 
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Meanwhile many liberals accepted that only the US 
army could be relied on to bring the values of 
tolerance and personal freedom - the West's 
enlightened inheritance - to the poor benighted 
countries of the Middle East.

The propaganda campaign for the invasion of Iraq 
included many, sometimes contradictory, themes. 
The appeal to the ideas of the conventional model 
of Enlightenment played an important part in 
reconciling some opinion to the need for war.

The armies of unreason - in the form of political 
Islam - were on the march, we were told. We had 
no choice but to defend ourselves and our values.

The disastrous failure of the US/British invasion 
shouldn't blind us to the role that the language 
of Enlightenment values played in securing 
support from some sections of the public.

And Kant's call to intellectual autonomy - "use 
your own reason" - fits neatly into the 
conventional enlightened rhetoric - as long as 
you don't read further than the first page.

It is much more difficult to use Kant to bolster 
this cartoon version of the Enlightenment if you 
read the rest of what is quite a short essay.

Unlike many of the people who quote him, Kant 
didn't think it was easy to reconcile making 
adult use of our reason with our duties and 
obligations as social creatures.

In fact, Kant was acutely aware of the threat 
that such a decision poses to the established 
order.

Enlightenment doesn't mean resisting external 
"threats to reason", it means recognising that in 
our everyday lives we operate within certain 
social constraints - and that certain topics are 
off the agenda.

Kant argues that it is only by consciously 
distancing ourselves from such social 
relationships that we can hope to achieve a 
genuinely Enlightened understanding of the world.

This, it seems to me, is a much more interesting 
account of what it would mean to be Enlightened 
than the conventional wisdom.

Kant directly challenges one of the dogmas of our 
age by insisting that we are necessarily 
compromised by the institutional and personal 
relationships within which we make our lives.

Our love of truth does not sit comfortably with 
our need for employment, with our sociability, or 
with the full expression of our humanity.

I am aware that this will sound strange to many 
on the left - and certainly Kant's idea of 
Enlightenment is very different from the world of 
revolutionary commitment. But I think Kant has a 
powerful point here.

It only takes a moment to recognise that certain 
questions don't get asked, certain stories don't 
get commissioned, certain subjects are best left 
unexamined.

For example, those who militantly insist on 
always telling the truth in the workplace are 
unlikely to get very far in building a career.

The greatest threat to the Enlightenment thus 
resides in our anxious insistence that we can 
easily reconcile our love of truth with the rest 
of the needs and fears that make us human.

And recognition of our own ambiguous attitude to 
the truth marks the beginning of true 
Enlightenment.

Dan Hind is author of The Threat To Reason: How 
The Enlightenment Was Hijacked And How We Can 
Reclaim It (Verso, £15).